Konversation is a free, user-friendly and open source graphical software developed especially for the KDE desktop environment, and designed to act as a full featured and highly configurable IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client.

Features at a glance

Key features include standard IRC functionality, support for SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) servers, bookmarking support, an easy-to-use GUI (Graphical User Interface), support for multiple channels and servers in a single window, as well as DCC (Direct Client-to-Client) file transfers.

In addition, the application also supports multiple identities for different servers, text colors and decorations, OSD (On-Screen Display) for notifications, automatic UTF-8 detection, per channel encoding support, system tray area support, and theme support for nick icons.

Designed for KDE

Like every other GNU/Linux application whose name starts with the K letter, Konversation has been designed for the KDE Plasma desktop environment, on which is usually installed and distributed, as a drop-in replacement for third-party IRC clients.

It has been successfully tested with several distributions of Linux that include the KDE Plasma graphical interface in their main software repositories, such as Kubuntu, Linux Mint KDE Edition or openSUSE.

Getting started with Konversation

To install the latest version of Konversation on your GNU/Linux operating system, you will have to first download the source tarball (tar.gz file) from Softpedia or the official website, save it on your computer, extract it and open a terminal emulator.

In the terminal window, use the ‘cd’ command to navigate to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/konversation-1.5/), run the ‘cmake .’ command to configure the program and the ‘make’ command to compile it for your hardware architecture.

Install the software system wide by executing the ‘make install’ command as root or with sudo, depending on your distribution. After installation, you can launch Konversation from the main menu of your desktop environment.

Konversation was reviewed by Marius Nestor, last updated on December 1st, 2014